The Last Christmas
by alexanderwales
Summary: The mantle of Santa Claus has been passed down once again, this time to an industrial engineer who starts to get some dangerous ideas in his head about the true meaning of Christmas. This fic is still being worked on, I tried to finish it before Christmas, but I think that the story suffered for it, so even though it's complete there will probably be a chapter or two added later.
1. Chapter 1

Charles wore the red and white suit, which didn't fit his thin frame. The old man had told him that it would, with time, but Charles had always been as skinny as a stick. Still, if he grew fat in the coming weeks, it would be far down the list of miraculous things that needed solving.

"I'm an industrial engineer," he'd said, when the old man had come to him. "I don't even have children."

"Neither do I, Charles," said the old man with a touch of sadness in his voice. "But I have seen how you look at them, and you appreciate children all the same."

There were a thousand objections that he should have given instead, when the old man had told him that the mantle of Santa Claus was being passed on. He should have asked how the man had gotten into his studio apartment, which had three locks on the door, or asked how the man had known his name, and he certainly should have objected to the notion that Santa Claus existed at all. Something stayed his tongue though, and it wasn't just surprise.

Now the old man was gone, and Charles had been declared the new Santa Claus before all of the elves and reindeer of the north pole. He'd been given no instructions from the old man, nothing other than an offer, which he'd accepted without hesitation. Charles had grown up in tenement housing, and his mother had been largely absent from his life. He'd nearly drowned himself in escapist books, where poor, unhappy boys got special powers or discovered secret worlds, and the expectation that something like that would happen had never really left him. Still, he had never expected this.

"Come this way," said Kelvin, a head elf who wore special golden epaulettes atop his red and green frippery. He seemed, more or less, the person in charge. Charles couldn't pretend to understand the first thing about fashion among the elves, but they dressed almost exclusively in red, green, white, gold, and silver. Even after half an hour it was starting to grate on his nerves. Kelvin had pointed ears and stood a bit taller than the others, coming up to just above Charles' navel. He had a serious and somewhat dour expression.

"This," he declared as he opened one of the many doors of the North Pole, "Is the List Room."

Before them was more of a stadium than a proper room, with tens of thousands of wooden desks arrayed in concentric circles with steps leading down. Two long pieces of paper hung down from the high ceiling in the center of the room, and when Charles looked up he could see that they were even longer than they appeared, rolling around metal bars until they were nearly a meter thick. From time to time, elves jogged down the steps to write at the very bottom of these papers.

"This is where we determine who is naughty and who is nice," said Kelvin. He stepped forward to the closest desk and placed his hand on the shoulder of the elf who was sitting there. "Paeter, please take a break while I show Santa the ropes." The elf looked between the two of them with shock, and simply nodded once before scurrying away.

"Now then," said Kelvin, "This is the viewing console, through which we watch the children and determine whether they are naughty or nice." The desk was angled, like an architect's desk, and the viewer took up the majority of it. The picture was clearer than any television that Charles had ever seen, and when he moved his head he realized that it produced a three-dimensional effect. It was a perfect window into the world that it was displaying, an autumn evening in New York City. A child of about seven walked down the sidewalk with a backpack on.

"Of course," said Kelvin, "You won't actually be doing any of the monitoring - that might have been feasible in the old days, but now it's more or less left to us. We have three people reviewing every child, and if there's no consensus -"

"I'm sorry, excuse me," said Charles, "But are you telling me that the elves have the ability to monitor every child in the world in real-time?"

Kelvin gave a merry laugh that sounded like tinkling bells, quite at odds with his normal demeanor. "Oh, my no. No, there are, at this time, roughly one and a quarter billion children in the world. To make the list in real-time with the proper oversights would require four billion elves, and that's assuming that we only slept when the children did. Of course, different children sleep at different times, so we'd have to segregate the elves into different populations to take different shifts, and of course that's just considering the elves that are working on making the list and checking it twice. It's under your authority to switch the systems that we use, but I have to say that I'm not terribly enthused about that idea, and I don't imagine that the others are either. But as I say, it's up to you." His sourness returned to him as he considered the logistics.

Charles frowned. "So then how do you make the list?"

"Simple," said Kelvin. "We check the children asynchronously." He pressed a mechanical lever just under the viewer, and the image of the child sped up considerably, until he was home in the space of a breath, playing videogames, eating supper, playing more videogames, and finally tossing and turning in his sleep. Kelvin moved a small orb under the viewer to control the angle that was shown on the screen, and after some quick, wordless demonstration of its abilities, he pushed another lever to pause the viewer entirely.

"So," said Charles, "We don't have real-time viewing of a child's actions, we have a full record of everything that they'd done?" He figured that it would be better to take all of the impossible things in stride and then freak out about them all at once later in the day to save time.

"Not just that," said Kelvin. He pressed another lever, and the viewer stopped focusing on the child and began to fly through walls, briefly showing insulation and structural supports. Eventually Kelvin seemed to find what he was looking for, and settled in on a woman putting on her makeup. "The viewer can look at adults to get some context about the child's life. This, for example, is … ah, Ms. Kerrimore, who teaches second grade to Luke Johnson, the boy we were just watching. Sometimes there are questions that arise which require more information."

Charles stared at the viewer with a frown. A giddy excitement was growing in his chest, and he worried that he would stand there with his jaw on the floor for hours if he dared to let it out. "So you have panopticon surveillance of both the past and the present anywhere on planet Earth," he said carefully.

"And the future," said Kelvin with a nod. "Everything from 00:01 UTC on December 25 of last year to 23:59 UTC on December 24th of this year. And I know what you're going to ask, but we still haven't been able to eliminate the one minute gap."

"That was not at even remotely where my concerns lie," said Charles. "We could see anything? Even things not directly related to whether children are naughty or nice?"

Kelvin turned to look him in the eye and furrowed his brow. "I suppose that's technically possible, but we're really not set up for it. The viewer can, they were built like that, but all the elves are trained to watch children. If you'd like, I can have a viewer set up in your rooms."

"But I mean - wait, I just thought of something, how does doing it this way really reduce your workload? You still have a billion kids to watch," said Charles. "You'd still need at least a significant fraction of that many elves to look through all of this footage, and if you're checking twice you'd need quite a bit more."

"Why would we?" asked Kelvin. "Oh, I think I see the misunderstanding here, the List Room and much of the North Pole itself is outside of time. We can take as many subjective years as we need to complete the list."

"And … how many years do you take every year?" asked Charles.

"It depends on the year," said Kelvin. "Going by current projections, this year it will take roughly fifty thousand years."

Charles dropped his hands to his side and stepped back. He looked out at the row upon row of desks, tens of thousands of elves looking at the lives of children. That alone boggled the mind, but to think that they'd be at it for longer than recorded history was nearly unfathomable.

"How long do elves even live?" asked Charles.

"As long as people, more or less; sixty years," replied Kelvin.

"So these elves won't ever see the fruits of their labors?" asked Charles. "They won't see the Christmas that they're preparing for?"

"Such is the life of an elf," replied Kelvin with a nod. "We do our work knowing that we're making Christmas morning special for the young children, and if we never get to see the Christmas we prepare for, we accept that." He stood up from the viewer. "Now, come along, there are two more stops on the tour before we show you to your rooms."

They walked together down the hallways of the North Pole, and Charles began to truly notice things for the first time. The doors were all sized for a normal person, though he was the only one in sight. Each door had two knobs, a large one and a small one. The fact that the entire place was sized for both of them seemed vaguely absurd.

"Sorry to bring this up so early," said Kelvin, "But the last Santa allowed us a small celebration when the last child had been checked twice. Some of the other elves were wondering if that tradition might be extended?"

"You're … you want a party?" asked Charles.

"If it's not too much trouble," said Kelvin. "We toil at the list for a great while you see, and -"

"Consider it done," said Charles.

"Thank you, Santa," said Kelvin.

They turned left down a festively decorated corridor, and Kelvin opened a wide set of double doors, which led out onto an immense workshop. Kelvin had halfway expected a factory, but instead it was simply row after row of wooden benches, and elves working with a handful of simple tools. It reminded him of nothing more than a sweatshop. Kelvin was used to factory floors; factories were what he did for a living. He'd been part of the team that had worked out the logistics for the most recent production run of Malibu Barbie.

"I have some questions," said Charles.

"Oh?" asked Kelvin. "Didn't you want to see the process a bit first."

"Before that," said Charles firmly. "What process is in place to decide what children get?"

"The Mail Room comes later in the tour," said Kelvin with a trace of irritation. "But we get letters from the children, the elves figure out what's reasonable and within our capacity to produce, and then we build them. Those who don't send us letters - which is the majority of children - have a gift selected for them by the elves which is both age, gender, and culture appropriate."

"All this is made by hand?" asked Charles.

Kelvin nodded. "We take dough from the extruder and shape it." He walked over to a close workbench, and again asked an elf to leave his station. "Here we're making a gift for Li Xiu Yang." As he said the name, his voice dipped into a flawless Chinese pronunciation. "She didn't send us a letter, and so she will be getting a small plastic frog."

The workbench was solid, with a skirt that dropped all the way to the floor. As Charles moved around to look, he could see a thick glass pipe running up the inside of it, which descended into the floor. Where it touched the top of the workbench, there was a metal aperture with an iris opening. On the workbench itself were a variety of tools, hammers, pliers, and a wide variety of others. Kelvin pressed down on one of the pedals near his stool, and the pipe extruded out a grey substance through the metal opening, which had dilated out to let it through. Kelvin took the ball of this stuff began to shape it with his hands, until it resembled a quite detailed frog. It looked something like a computer rendering before the lighting, bump-mapping, and textures had been applied. Then, with a snap of his fingers it took on its proper form and color. Kelvin handed it to Charles, who took it delicately between his thin fingers. It felt and looked exactly like plastic. As Charles turned it around, he could even see a line of flash from where an injection machine would have left extra plastic.

"How?" asked Charles.

"Magic," said Kelvin with a shrug. When it became clear this wouldn't be enough of an answer, he added, "The dough can be shaped into anything, and once we have completed the assembly of the thing, we merely have to snap our fingers to change the materials into the proper form."

"Then … then why in the world does this small plastic frog have flash from injection moulding?"

"Authenticity," replied Kelvin. "If we were to make our plastics perfectly, people might get suspicious. We're well familiar with the processes that the factories use, and we copy them as exactly as possible." He took the plastic frog back, and with a flourish pulled a wrapping paper and ribbon from a compartment in the workshop table. The frog was wrapped in less than three seconds, and the elf wrote out a long list of identifying information on a label, which he tied to the present. He pressed another lever beneath the table, and the metal iris opened back up. Kelvin dropped the present down it, and it disappeared with a pneumatic woosh. "That's one done," he said with satisfaction. He stood from the desk and looked at Charles expectantly.

"I'm sorry," said Charles, "But I'm just starting to catch up to things, this was all thrust on me quite suddenly."

"Yes," said Kelvin, "I understand."

"So on Christmas Day, this Li Xiu will find a present under her Christmas tree?" he asked.

"According to her dossier, she doesn't actually believe in Christmas, more's the shame," said Kelvin. "We'll instead arrange for her to find it under her pillow or in with her other toys. The wrapping will have to come off, of course, and we'll strip the present of its label since she doesn't read English anyway, but she'll get her gift all the same. Delivered by you, of course."

"I see," said Charles, though he didn't really see at all.

"Come along then, there's much more of the North Pole to visit," said the elf.

They walked down the hallways, and a thought occurred to Charles. "Why do you need me at all?" he asked. "You obviously have all these fantastic powers, why don't the elves deliver the gifts without me needing to get in a sleigh?"

"There was an incident," replied Kelvin. "We did spread Christmas cheer without a Santa, for almost five hundred years. And then … then were a series of failures. A child was put on the nice list, even though he was very naughty. We were tasked with making a present for him, and made something that we shouldn't have, due to a failure in the workshop. And we delivered it, because the elves in charge of delivery didn't have any knowledge of what the present actually was. We unanimously decided afterwards that we needed to have a Santa again, to keep us in check."

"What was the gift that you gave the boy?" asked Charles. "What could have been so bad?"

"We gave him a rat," said Kelvin. "A diseased rat."

A chill ran through Charles' veins. "When?" he asked.

"1348," replied Kelvin. "Of course, we realized the mistake slowly over the course of the year, but there wasn't anything that we could do about it. We simply resolved to do better in the future, and having a Santa is part of that."

"So I'm … a figurehead?" asked Charles. "A moral compass?"

"If that's how you'd prefer to think of things," said Kelvin. "You have authority over us, because we cannot trust ourselves to do things properly."

The rest of the tour consisted of the Mail Room, the stables that held the reindeer and the sled, and a variety of other things - none of which came close to their production and surveillance abilities. The elves had a control of space and time itself, and they wanted to show him beasts of burden; there was something very wrong with the place.

"These are your rooms," said Kelvin at the end of the tour. "There's a bedroom, bathroom, living room, dining room, access to cable television and the internet, and a small kitchen, though we will be more than happy to cook you whatever you would like if only you say the word. Ring this bell, and an elf will come to assist you in any way you might desire. We've added another room onto your suite which contains a viewer, as you'd mentioned you'd like to have one - I've included not only the recording for this year, but the archives of years past as well." He bowed slightly and left Charles alone, to look around his room. The furnishings were opulent, if slightly gaudy, and the suite was three times the size his apartment had been. As he looked around, he could see that many of his belongings had been transferred over - the guitar he'd told himself that he would learn to play some day, a painting his ex-girlfriend had made him that he'd never had the heart to throw away, and a dozen other reminders of the real world - a world that had made sense.


	2. Chapter 2

Though he was tired, he immediately went to the viewer. The controls were mechanical and extremely tactile, though smooth and polished. Charles supposed that there must be a team of elves which built and repaired the devices, unless they were simply conjured from grey blobs like the toys were.

He turned the dial back as far as it would go, to December 25th of the previous year, then zoomed all the way out until he was looking at the entire Earth. A small elfish equivalent to a dialog box, in scrollwork and elaborate cursive, popped up in the lower corner and asked him if he would like to move to the previous year, but he ignored it for the time being. There seemed to be a limit to the maximum distance away from the Earth he could move the viewer. After playing around with the control some, he realized that it was just beyond the orbit of the moon. He looked around for a pen and paper to write that down on, but found none around him.

He got up from the viewer and rang the bell, and was only mildly surprised when the door to his room opened less than half a second later, before the sound of the bell had even left the air.

"What can I get for you, Santa?" asked a female elf with long black hair. She was shorter than Kelvin by a few inches, and was dressed in a green skirt with striped tights.

"Um," said Charles. "I need a pen and paper."

"Certainly," she said. "Do you have a preference?"

"No," said Charles. "I'm making some notes, so more than a few sheets I suppose."

"Right away, Santa," the elf said with a smile.

Charles closed the door, and knocking came from the other side immediately afterwards. He opened the door to see what she had forgotten to ask him, but instead the same elf stood there with a pen and notebook in hand. Both were of exquisite quality.

"Will that be all?" asked the elf.

"What's your name?" asked Charles.

"Matilda," she replied. "I am honored that you asked."

"How did you get this to me so quickly?" he asked.

"Your rooms can be offset in time from the rest of the North Pole," Matilda replied. "We do it so that you don't have to live through the entire time we spend preparing for Christmas. I momentarily disconnected you from the passage of time so that I could have those made for you." She looked slightly worried. "Was that alright? The past Santa liked the perception of having things right away."

"Ah," said Charles. "I had wondered about that. So I don't actually live out the fifty thousand years it will take."

"You can, Santa, if you want," said Matilda. "One of the benefits of your position is immortality."

"I see," said Charles. That would take some thinking on.

"Will that be all?" asked Matilda.

Charles looked down at the pen and paper in his hands. "You can get me anything that I want, within reason?"

"Yes, Santa," replied Matilda. She hesitated slightly before more words spilled out. "I am also trained in many ways to offer you what assistance you need." She blushed after she'd said it, and looked at the floor.

"You mean …" he trailed off, but she didn't offer to finish his sentence. "If I asked you to do anything, no matter what it was, you would do it?"

"Yes, Santa," she replied, eyes glued to the floor. She must have caught something in his tone. "Even that. I have training in ways to please you." Charles felt his stomach lurch.

"Did the previous Santa ask for that sort of thing?" asked Charles. "Did he ask you to - did he - oh, I think I'm going to be sick."

Matilda took his hand and led him to the bed, and for a moment he thought that she had the wrong idea, but she sat him down and then pushed his head gently until it was between his knees.

"Relax, Santa," said Matilda softly. "Breathe. You've had a lot of shocks today, and they're catching up to you."

"How could he?" asked Charles. "How could he even do it? I mean, ethics aside, you're only three feet tall, the anatomy of it all -"

"I'm three feet and seven inches tall," said Matilda, somewhat defensively. "And I told you that I had training. I've been informed by my instructors that it would be somewhat painful -" Charles choked out a disbelieving laugh. "- but to have personal contact with Santa in one's lifetime is considered an honor."

"He was such a jolly man though!" said Charles. "And he kept sex slaves?"

"Elves aren't slaves, Santa," said Matilda.

"If I asked you - purely hypothetically - to take a knife and disembowel yourself, would you?" asked Charles.

"Yes," said Matilda.

"You wouldn't even make any arguments for why you should live?" asked Charles.

"My life is meaningless in the face of the Christmas spirit," said Matilda.

"But if it didn't matter to the Christmas spirit," said Charles, "If I just wanted to see you die for fun?"

"Allowing you to satisfy your desires is part of maintaining the Christmas spirit, Santa," said Matilda. "A merry Santa means a merry Christmas, as we say." She smiled at him, but he could see something false in her small eyes.

"You don't actually believe that," he said.

"Of course I believe it!" she said. "All elves believe it."

"Okay," said Charles slowly. "Well even if you believe it, you still wouldn't want to die."

"I want what you want," said Matilda. "If you want me to die, then I want to die."

"I don't want you to die," said Charles.

"Then I don't want to die," said Matilda.

"The old Santa, did he … did he ever abuse his power?" asked Charles.

"In what way?" asked Matilda. "I've told you that we live to serve you in making a successful Christmas."

"He had sex with you," said Charles bluntly.

"Not me, Santa," said Matilda. "Others though, yes." Another false smile graced her face, and he could feel the strain of forced pleasantness. "He had very specific requirements, one of which was that any elf who gratified him sexually had to be a virgin. He also -"

"I don't want to hear about it," said Charles. His stomach was churning again, and he felt like he would throw up. "I need to know one more thing though. Did he ever kill any of you, or ask you to kill yourselves?"

"Yes, Santa," said Matilda.

"Oh God," said Charles. "Jesus, I can't handle this. What … what kind of monster was he? Why would a man like that choose me to replace him?"

"I don't know," said Matilda.

"He seemed so nice," said Charles.

They sat together on the bed for awhile.

"I need to be alone with my thoughts," said Charles. "You'll be there if I ring the bell?"

"Yes, Santa," said Matilda.

"And can you stop calling me Santa?" asked Charles.

"Yes," replied Matilda. "Do you want the other elves to stop calling you Santa as well?"

"So long as you're the one that's going to be there when I ring the bell, just you for now," sad Charles. "No need to make a big deal about it."

"Very well," she replied. She got up from the bed and walked over to the door. "I'll be available if you need anything." With that she left, leaving Charles alone with his thoughts.

After some time had passed, he went back to the viewer, more to give himself something to do than to actually make the notes he'd been thinking of making. He felt ill, but knew that he wouldn't be able to sleep.

The viewer showed Earth, frozen in a single slice of time. He zoomed in towards the planet, rotating around the skin of the Earth until he found North America, then in again until he found New York City. It was the work of a few minutes for him to find a familiar landmark and then move the viewer along the streets until he found his apartment. He moved the viewpoint through the walls, then up several floors until he found his own apartment. He watched himself sitting there, with his arm around Catherine as they watched Die Hard on DVD. He'd always said it was his favorite Christmas movie.

That had been almost an entire year ago. He pushed down the lever to move the viewer forward in real time, and he watched himself interacting with Catherine, the lazy way he'd stroked her hair. They were six months away from a particularly brutal break-up after four years of dating. He wasn't sure why he'd chosen to look at something that was still so painful. Perhaps it was to convince himself that he was just a normal person, with normal hopes and fears. He felt a nagging worry that perhaps the old Santa had started out like him, and simply gone drunk with power. Telling himself that he wasn't like that helped somewhat.


	3. Chapter 3

Charles awoke in the morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. The bed was soft and fluffy, and he experienced a moment of confused bliss as he lay beneath the warm sheets, until he remembered that he was Santa Claus, and that the previous person to wear that mantle had been a monster.

He'd practically filled the notebook the night before, mostly with questions that he would need an elf to answer. He put on the red and white suit again, brushed his teeth, and then rang the bell. The same elf from before, Matilda, opened the door with a heavy tray of food balanced precariously in one hand.

"I thought you would like some breakfast," she said with a smile. If the conversation of the last night was haunting her as it was Charles, she wasn't showing it.

Charles sat down at a rustic oak table in the dining room and looked at the spread she had prepared. There was bacon, three varieties of eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy, orange juice, milk, eggnog, pancakes, waffles, two different bowls of cereal, a variety of fresh fruit, oatmeal, and three doughnuts.

"We didn't know what you might want," said Matilda apologetically, "So I decided to offer a little bit of everything. Let me know what you prefer are and I can get you the breakfast of your choice tomorrow, or I can fetch more immediately if this isn't okay."

Charles dug in, and was halfway through the plate when he realized that he was eating far more than normal.

"I'm unusually hungry," he said, with a doughnut poised halfway to his mouth. Matilda said nothing. "Kelvin said that I would get fatter, is that what he meant?"

"Yes," said Matilda. She offered nothing more.

Charles finished eating the doughnut and looked at her with narrowed eyes. "Being Santa makes a person hungry?"

"Santa should be jolly," she replied.

"You're allowed to evade questions?" he asked.

"There's no prohibition against it," she replied.

"Well," said Charles, "There is now. Why exactly am I hungry?"

"It's part of the spirit of Christmas," explained Matilda. "We alter your brain just a little bit so that you'll put on weight and be more jolly."

"You … you can do that?" asked Charles.

"Yes," replied Matilda with a nod. "Though we don't do it in ways that would alter your will. That's the whole point of having a Santa, to make sure that we follow the Christmas spirit."

Charles immediately thought of the previous Santa. Perhaps the elves were simply insane, and meddled with the mind of their Santa in ways that they didn't foresee, or perhaps they were lying to him. There certainly seemed to be a sort of institutional incompetence about them, for all of their wonderful abilities and devices. When he'd been given the tour the day before, he'd seen a hundred optimizations that he'd like to make, given the time, and apparently there was more time than anything else. The thought of them playing with his brain and turning him into some kind of murderous, rapist monster was terrifying, if oddly plausible.

"What if I asked you to change me back, or I said that I don't want to be fat?" he asked.

Matilda frowned. "That wouldn't be in the Christmas spirit," she said.

"You said, yesterday, that anything I wanted was by definition the Christmas spirit, that a merry Santa means a merry Christmas," said Charles.

"I - I did," said Matilda. "And they're both true."

As Charles watched her, he saw a trickle of blood drop down from her nose and roll until it hit her lips. "Jesus," he said quickly. "Forget I said anything, I want to be fat."

"Okay," said Matilda, seemingly unaware that anything had happened. She absent mindedly licked at the blood that had come from her nose. "Are you enjoying your breakfast?"

"Yes," said Charles. "It's very good, thank you."

He finished everything on his plate, and added another entry to his notebook. Elves can suffer/die from contradictions in the Christmas spirit? Find out what Christmas spirit is. There were more important things to worry about in the meantime though.

"Matilda, why doesn't anyone know about us?" asked Charles. "Why do people think that Santa is a myth if I'm - if this whole thing is real? Are we wiping their memories or something?"

"No," she said. "We don't do that. We just make very sure to leave doubt in the minds of children and parents. It requires very carefully selecting gifts and placing them with care." Charles was very careful to note that it was something that they didn't do, not that it was something that they couldn't do.

"Why though?" asked Charles. "Why not let people know that Santa is real? Why make it a matter of faith?"

"After he saw the first atomic weapons, Santa feared that the North Pole would be discovered if we were too obvious, and that if they discovered us they would bomb us," said Matilda.

"Which Santa?" asked Charles.

"The one you replaced," answered Matilda.

"Wait, how old was he?" asked Charles.

"He was born in 1864, and experienced three thousand two hundred and sixty four subjective years in the North Pole, not including the time spent delivering presents, naturally," said Matilda. Charles could feel the blood draining from his face as he thought about how long that man had been abusing the elves.

"So … he decided that everything should be a total secret?" asked Charles. "And that's why it's secret, not because it's something intrinsic to the spirit of Christmas?"

"That is correct," said Matilda.

"And secrecy is the reason that poor children don't get as many toys?" he asked.

"It's one of the reasons," said Matilda. "If you give a nice gift to a poor child, their parents will sometimes take it and sell it, which isn't in the Christmas spirit at all."

Charles closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm hesitant to just reverse all these decisions that were made without first knowing all the reasons behind them, but it seems idiotic to me that we have an effectively unlimited source of material wealth and we're using it only on a single day of the year to give presents to only children, and in such a way that those who need the least get the most."

Matilda said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

"It's unfair," said Charles.

"Life is unfair," said Matilda.

"Does it have to be?" asked Charles. "Is that the Christmas spirit?"

"I don't know," said Matilda. "Fairness doesn't enter into it, I don't think. Why should Christmas be fair if life isn't fair?"

"Because," said Charles slowly. "We can make it fair. Not just Christmas, but life." He looked towards the door that led out of his chambers. "I need time to think. Tell me, is time still passing out there?"

"Time is passing in the North Pole, but not in the wider world," said Matilda. "In theory it's possible to decouple these rooms from the rest of the North Pole in the opposite direction, so that the only time that's passing is here."

"Do it," said Charles. "I don't want the elves wasting thousands of years on things that I might want to change."

"Is it alright if I make the arrangements while you're at a standstill?" she asked. "It might take years to engineer."

Charles rubbed his forehead. "Sure, but make sure that you're in here with me while I think, I have more questions."

Matilda quickly exited the room and reentered in a different outfit - equally festive - a second later.

"It took some doing, but we're cut off from the normal flow of time, and the rest of the North Pole is waiting for us to resume. All you have to do is ring the bell to reconnect," she said.

"Okay," said Charles. "So, the giving of presents is bound to a single day of the year, in accordance with the spirit of Christmas." Matilda nodded. "There's no real need to keep secret, just a convention. Is there an upper limit on the value of presents we can give?"

"No," said Matilda. "If you want to throw out all of the rules that the old Santa established, and the rules of the Santa before him, there's nothing we could make that we couldn't give to a child."

"Next question - what are the limits on what the elves can produce?" he asked.

"The only limits are physical reality," said Matilda.

"Which I've come to learn is a bit more fluid than in years past," said Charles. "So, for example, we could give every child a brick of gold?"

"All the ones on the Nice list," said Matilda.

"Only, we wouldn't want to do that anyway, because it would make gold practically worthless. We could give every child pretty much anything we wanted, but the real question is what we could give them that would make the most difference." He tapped his lips with this finger. "A computer, maybe? A laptop that could help boost education in the third world?"

"We know what the children want," said Matilda. "So long as they write a letter to Santa, we can read over their shoulder and figure it out. And if they don't write Santa, we can think of something appropriate."

"Right," said Charles, "But I'm not trying to figure out what they want, I'm trying to do the most good."

"Hrm," said Matilda. "Doing good isn't part of the Christmas spirit."

"It's not?" asked Charles. "But that doesn't make any sense, why do we even have a naughty or nice list then? Isn't the whole point to differentiate good from bad?"

"Naughty and nice are determined by Santa," said Matilda. "You tell us what's naughty and what's nice, and we use the viewers to put children on the list."

"But you had already started on the list, when I went into the List Room with Kelvin, right?" asked Charles.

"We weren't under the impression that you would change it. The last Santa left it as it was for his entire time here." She shrugged. "If you want to change how naughty and nice are determined, we'll start the list over."

Charles gave this some thought. They'd said that it took fifty thousand years per Christmas to review all of the children. If he made them redo the list, it would mean hundreds of generations of elves living and dying in order to get Christmas ready. "Hold off on that for now," said Charles. "So doing good isn't part of the Christmas spirit, but it's not directly contradicted by the Christmas spirit, right? Let me back up for a moment - what exactly defines the Christmas spirit?"

"The Christmas spirit is when a child opens presents in the morning," said Matilda. "It's a sip of eggnog, it's snowball fights, it's Jack Frost nipping at your nose, it's -"

"I'm sorry," said Charles. "Let me stop you right there. You're listing off things that have the quality of being in the Christmas spirit, but you haven't actually offered me a definition. How could I tell whether something is in the Christmas spirit?"

"I'm afraid that I don't understand the question," said Matilda.

"What I mean to say is that - let's say that I have a new concept or item, what we'll call a widget. How do I know whether or not it's part of the Christmas spirit?" he asked.

"Well, what is a widget?" asked Matilda.

"You're missing the point," replied Charles with a sigh. "We have two sets here, right? We have the set of all things that are in the Christmas spirit, and the set of all things that aren't in the Christmas spirit."

"Also the set of all things that contradict the Christmas spirit," said Matilda.

"Right, a third category that I hadn't realized existed until you said something," said Charles. "Now, is there a useful and hopefully concise way to distinguish between these three groupings without actually having to know everything that's in all the sets?"

"No," said Matilda.

"Well … how do elves learn what's in the Christmas spirit? Do you learn it growing up, are you taught it by your parents … ?" asked Charles.

"We just know," said Matilda.

Charles was just about ready to beat his head against the table until he wasn't able to feel his brain anymore. In the worst case scenario, he could just repeatedly ask Matilda over and over whether this or that thing was part of the Christmas spirit, but that seemed overly laborious and prone to error. If Matilda was typical of the elves, that meant that he could do them some damage by asking them to go against the Christmas spirit, or even pointing out contradictions, and he couldn't think of a good, ethical way to test how much damage he'd do to the elves if he got the Christmas spirit wrong. Reluctantly, he got out a pen and paper and began to figure it out.

The Christmas spirit was confusing. Charles had built himself a diagram, with one large area labeled "CS" for "Christmas spirit". The CS set contained objects (eggnog, gingerbread houses, candy canes), people (Santa Claus, elves), locations (the North Pole), actions (opening presents, going down chimneys), and even colors (red and green). By the time he finally called it quits, he was starting to suspect that perhaps there really was no single defining factor of all of the things in the CS set, especially since Matilda claimed that sometimes things stopped being part of the Christmas spirit. He should have figured that from the start, since Christmas was a cultural phenomenon, but he did come away from the question and answer session with some useful information.

It seemed that the elves only really explicitly cared about those things within the CS set which they were in charge of, namely the creation and distribution of presents, the North Pole, making the list and checking it twice, the sleigh, the reindeer, and Santa. They had an affection for everything else within the CS set, and it explained much of their fashion, decoration, diet, and architectural choices, but none of that was an absolute requirement, and Charles really had no intent on changing any of it. What the elves got up to in their free time was really not his concern, so long as they weren't altering his mind.

"Okay," he said to Matilda at the end of the day. "There's still a lot that I don't know, but we've made some good headway. I think I can see a way to do what I want to do while still keeping within the Christmas spirit."

"Good!" she said with a smile. "The Christmas spirit is very important."


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning, the very first stop that Charles made - after another enormous and varied breakfast - was to the List Room. Matilda stood by his side. He'd asked for Kelvin as well, but had been told that he was unavailable. He hadn't actually thought that elves could be unavailable, but it was another data point to add to his model of how the North Pole worked.

"Effective immediately, there is to be one child on the Naughty list," he said to the elves. Kelvin, or another elf manager if they had those, would have to work out the exact details of what that meant. It was the first loophole he'd found that he could actually do something about; there had to be a List, and it had to be divided into naughty and nice, but the naughty side could be made as short as possible. Matilda had started to look ill when he'd suggested that they have zero children on the naughty list, so instead there would be only one. It wouldn't really matter what the naughty and nice criteria was if everyone but the naughtiest child in the world was automatically marked as nice.

Charles had thought about it, and couldn't really see how it could backfire to maximize the number of gifts given to the children. He'd wanted to cut the list-making down enough that the viewers weren't even needed, so that a single child was randomly selected as naughty, but Matilda had seemed very uncomfortable with that concept. There had to be further optimizations to be done, but he would get to it later. Speaking with Matilda hadn't revealed a good way to change the definitions of naughty and nice, to make it so simple and arbitrary that making the list and checking it twice could be reduced to the work of a single elf. To Charles' mind, it was better to make a change for the more optimal to see the elves react than it was to expect to get everything in perfect working order all at once. He didn't intend to let them live thousands of years while he was in stasis; he'd watch closely to see the actual effects of what he'd told them.

His next stop was to the Toy Room. The elf working at a desk near the front looked startled, and his eyes went wide when he saw Santa come strolling in, but Charles was now a man with a plan.

"Li Xiu Yang is a Chinese girl who was going to get a small plastic frog for Christmas," he said. "Instead, I want you to make a present for her that will maximize her happiness, ignoring any secrecy concerns. Can you do that?" Matilda had said that they could, and he hoped that it was true. The elf said nothing but worked quickly, pinching off what looked like a grey cigar from the extruder. He spent a few seconds shaping it, and then it turned jet black with a small red button on top.

"What's that?" asked Charles. He picked up the toy and looked at it, being very careful not to touch the button. If there was one thing he'd learned in a lifetime around heavy industrial machines, it was that you shouldn't press a button if you had no idea what it did.

"It's - it doesn't have a name," said the elf. He was sweating, not from the exertion of the work but from sheer nerves. Charles felt a pang of sympathy. "When the button is pressed, it will activate the neurons in her brain and make her maximally happy. It has its own internal power source, and will continue going until she dies."

"That … that is not at all what I meant," said Charles. "She just won't eat? Her parents will try to rouse her and she'll be a vegetable? What good is happiness if you die in a few days?"

The elf leaned forward and grabbed the device back. In his hands it melted to grey again, and he pulled at it as though it were taffy, looking at the strands of grey that came out. After a few seconds, he collapsed it all back together, and recreated the device. It looked the same as before. "There," said the elf with satisfaction. "Now it will stimulate the neurons in her brain and make her maximally happy, and also alter her motor cortex to be independent of the rest of her brain. Her body will seek out food without interfering with her happiness."

Charles stared at him. "Okay, even if that were true, her parents and friends would still be sad that they couldn't interact with her, wouldn't they?"

The elf frowned. "One moment, I didn't realize that was a constraint." The device burst apart once more, this time into grey cobwebs as the elf's deft fingers moved through, poking and prodding at it. A full minute passed before he collapsed it back down into the same black tube with a red button on top. "There," said the elf. "Now when the button is pressed, it will not only activate the patterns for happiness in Li Xiu Yang's brain, but in the brains of her parents and friends. And I do believe that I've anticipated your next objection - the device will multiply itself, drawing matter from its surroundings, in order to make the parents and friends of the parents and friends of Li Xiu Yang happy, and so on."

"It's a self-replicator," said Charles. He stared at the device in horror. "Never, ever make self-replicators. They spiral out of control."

The elf frowned. "Well, then I'm not sure that with the constraints that you've set out this is going to be possible. Perhaps if the biology restriction was removed -"

"No," said Charles. "I'm beginning to understand why you elves need a Santa. Give Li Xiu Yang a plastic frog instead. We'll deal with this later."

He walked from the Toy Room feeling somewhat let down. This was supposed to have been the point where he'd converted the raw potential of the North Pole into maximum utility for the human race, yet it was very apparent that the elves actually did need him in order to stop them from destroying the world or accidentally killing everyone. He was thankful, at least, that he'd done a small test run of his ideas instead of just giving out a command. It was an odd thing, to be congratulating himself for not accidentally destroying the whole world, but it seemed almost par for the course when it came to being Santa.

"Matilda, why are elves so bad at understanding the consequences of their actions?" he asked.

"I don't understand what you mean," she said. "We understand the consequences of our actions better than most humans do."

"Yet that elf back there was perfectly ready to give a little girl a device that would have left her essentially brain dead, unless I had a gross misunderstanding of what he said." He looked down the hallway. "But actually, the more I think about it, he did understood what his device would do, he just didn't care. Or he cared, but he didn't share the same value system that I do. Matilda, tell me, are elves capable of understanding the value system of a human? Not just any human, but me?"

"No," she replied. She had a pensive look on her face. "There was a time when we thought that we could. When Santa died without a successor, we decided that Santa should be elected from among the elves. The elf's body was modified to take on the proper appearance, the bones stretched and flesh stitched onto him. Kelvin told you about the Black Death?" Charles nodded. "Well, that was the result of our attempts to do everything ourselves. There was a disagreement among the elves about whether the Black Death was contradictory to the Christmas spirit - in the counter-CS set, as you say. We had a civil war over it, and the anti-Plague side won. In the wake of that we adopted a human Santa."

"Ah," said Charles. "Well, I haven't given up on making the world a better place, not that easily."

"Of course," replied Matilda.

"Where's Kelvin?" he asked. "I was given to understand that he was sort of in charge of things around here? They said he was unavailable."

"He died while we were adapting your rooms to be the focal point of the time field," said Matilda. "I was selected as his replacement."

"He died?" asked Charles. "From an accident, or - how long did that take?"

"Sixty-three subjective years," said Matilda.

"Why do you still look the same?" asked Charles. "You stepped outside of time while they worked on it? Why didn't Kelvin?"

"We couldn't step outside time," she replied. "Not while work was being done on the fields, not if we wanted to keep you isolated from time as well. We lived it, and Kelvin was already fairly old as far as elves go."

"And yet you remain the same," said Charles slowly. It was slowly beginning to dawn on him that he really shouldn't have done anything before he had enough information.

"You said that you didn't want me to die," said Matilda. "So I won't die. Did you want me to age? Female elves don't normally, that was something the last Santa decided on. He didn't like the way we looked when we got older. We just die at sixty years old, normally."

"You - all the elves have the ability to be immortal, and just haven't done it?" asked Charles. "That's insane. It's not just that I don't want you to die, I don't want any of the elves to die. If you can stop all the elves from aging, do it. Wait, sorry, stop them from aging only once they've reached whatever age the elves are when they stop growing." He thought about that for a few more minutes, and hoped that he hadn't just made a major mistake. "How immortal are the both of us?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" asked Matilda. She'd written a letter as they walked and handed it off to a runner. The elves worked quickly, Charles would give them that. No doubt all the elves would be immortal within the span of a few days. It was almost frightening.

"There are different levels of immortality, the way I see it. Sometimes immortal means that you just don't age, sometimes it means that you can't die from internal problem, so I mean … if I were shot through the heart, what would happen?" he asked.

"The flesh would regenerate," she replied. "Nothing short of a complete vaporization of your body would kill you, and assuming that the North Pole wasn't also destroyed we would restore you from backup if you were killed."

Charles came to a full stop in the middle of the hallway, and the coterie of elves that moved with them respectfully stopped as well.

"What?" he asked. "You have a backup of me?"

"The last Santa demanded it," she said. "It's part of how we run Christmas Day anyway. The process was too tedious for a human if they had to physically deliver presents to every household. So instead we make duplicates of Santa, send them out, and then selectively merge the experiences down into a representative sample. If we didn't, then after only a single Christmas you would have spent the vast majority of your life delivering presents, which the human mind apparently can't take. It was trivial to adapt the same techniques to recreate our Santa in the event of his death."

"I wasn't told that," said Charles. "Kelvin, he showed me the room with the sleigh and the reindeer - you're saying that on Christmas Day you make copies of me and send them out to do the Santa work, going down chimneys and delivering presents?"

"More or less," said Matilda. "When the duplicates came back, the old Santa liked to fight to the death with them, and the survivor was -"

"New rule," said Charles. "Please don't tell me what the old Santa used to do unless I explicitly ask you. It keeps making me feel sick."

"Okay," said Matilda.

"Come with me," he said. "I'm going back to my room to think for a bit."

It was a full day later when he finally had his proposal for the elves.

"I want Li Xiu Yang to be given a gift that will leave her permanently physically healthy, uninjured, and with a mental state that is within three sigmas of normal for her age, gender, and culture. I want her to be free from any disability or degradation of any of her senses, organs, or other body parts. Whatever solution you give should age her at the normal rate until her twentieth birthday, at which point she should cease to age."

The elf gave him a funny look, then began to shape the ball of grey goop. Three minutes later, he presented Charles with a small pebble.

"This is it?" he asked. "And it won't turn her into some kind of monster, or cause her unbearable pain, or anything like that?"

The elf sighed and took the pebble back, then after a few moments of reconstruction handed it back to Charles.

"Well, that certainly inspired confidence," he said dryly. "I'm only allowed to deliver presents on Christmas?" asked Charles.

"Yes," said Matilda. "Santa doesn't leave the North Pole except for a single day, or when he passes on the mantle."

"So if I wanted to use this one child as a testbed, I would have to deliver the gift to her in 2013 and then wait until Christmas of 2014 to give the rest of the children their own version, assuming that everything went well?" he asked.

"That's more or less correct," said Matilda. "You're worried that the gift doesn't match your intent?"

"Of course I am," said Charles. "And I know that you don't have the ability to actually model my intent, because otherwise things would already be as perfect as I want them to be. Alright, I guess that I'll choose the immortality pebble as a gift for a random sample of a hundred children and see how it goes. It's hardly what I would call ethical, but the only way around that would be to get consent, and since they're children I don't see how that would be possible. At least I'm doing more than the last Santa did."

"He is a worse man than you," said Matilda.

"Wait, sorry," said Charles. "Is? He's still alive?"

"Oh yes," said Matilda.

"I'd thought - he said that he would fade away, that he'd been Santa for long enough," said Charles. He had assumed that was the truth, even after hearing about all of the things the man had done. He hadn't even really thought about it, just somehow assumed that the man was done with doing terrible things, that he'd chosen death. "That was a lie, he lied to me."

"Yes," said Matilda.

Charles groaned. "Shit."


	5. Chapter 5

Charles sat in his private viewing room, with Matilda right beside him.

"We're outside of time, right?" asked Charles. "The viewer shows us everything that happened this year, but it's not actually the end of the year yet. How does that work?"

"We extrapolate forward," said Matilda. "We take the world as it was and simulate the whole thing forward from the moment that we left time."

"Of course you do," said Charles. "That makes just the most perfect sense." He rubbed his forehead. "We can just simulate the future of the universe? We can see everything that's going to happen? And it will be accurate?"

"Yes, that's how the list is made," said Matilda patiently, as though she were explaining things to a child.

"And out there - does it even make sense to ask what time it is?" he asked.

"August 9th, 2013," replied Matilda. "At 3:42pm UTC."

"Find me the other Santa," said Charles. Matilda worked the viewer as he looked over her diminutive shoulder. Eventually she focused in on a non-descript man with brown hair, who stepped from a doorway in a brown coat. He had a grin on his face. She'd moved the viewer quickly, but it seemed to be somewhere in London.

"That's him?" asked Charles.

"Yes," she replied. "He asked for some alterations before he left. He said that he wouldn't be Santa anymore, that he was tired of being fat and bearded. He went back to being James Wakefield. We think he disliked the restrictions of being Santa," said Matilda with a frown. "We wouldn't let him kill anyone. Elves can't act contrary to the Christmas spirit."

"You let him hurt you," he said. "You let him kill you." The Christmas spirit had loopholes that you could drive a truck through, he'd already found that out. Killing everyone in the world would be as easy as saying the right sentence to a single elf.

"We're not people," replied Matilda. "We're elves."

"Okay. We'll deal with that statement later." Charles heaved a sigh. "You knew that he was going to kill when you set him loose, and yet you gave him a new body anyway."

"We would do the same for you, if you asked us to," said Matilda. "But when you left, you wouldn't be Santa anymore."

"Run the viewer forward," said Charles. "Until he kills."

It took all of three minutes. The moment that James spotted a woman across the street, he dashed towards her with inhuman speed and pinned her to a wall, stabbing her repeatedly in the chest and stomach. He smiled as he did it. Charles turned away, but Matilda continued to watch dispassionately. Eventually, a tiny frown formed on her face.

"He moved fast," said Charles. "Too fast. Something was done to his body, he's not fully human anymore."

"Human is a fluid concept," said Matilda. "You're speaking as an immortal."

"You know what I mean. You didn't just send him out with a human body," said Charles. He looked back towards the viewer, where James Wakefield was running at thirty miles per hour with long, effortless strides. "He's superhuman now." James reached a crowd of people and murdered them in a handful of seconds, snapping their necks or slitting their throats. "All the things that you said about my immortality, they apply to him too? He can't easily die and he's stored in backup?"

"Yes," said Matilda.

"Shut the backups down," said Charles.

"We don't know where they are," said Matilda. "He laid them down last Christmas and scrubbed their placement from the viewers."

"Okay, so if we want to kill him -"

"We can't let you," said Matilda. She wore a very serious expression.

"Shit," said Charles. "Well, okay, I can't kill him, but I can restrain him somehow?"

"Santa can't leave the North Pole at all until Christmas," said Matilda. "Not unless you're choosing a successor. Once you give up the mantle we'll send you on your way, but the Christmas spirit doesn't allow for Santa showing up in August. Sorry."

"Fuck the Christmas spirit," said Charles. "Why in the world are you allowing him to behave like this?" He pointed to the viewer, where James Wakefield, the one-time Santa, was drinking blood from a hole he'd cut in a woman's neck. "Jesus, I'm going to be sick."

"He's human," said Matilda. "Humans kill each other all the time."

"I know," said Charles. "So Santa isn't allow to kill, but wider set of humans are. Therefore, if you're Santa and you want to kill humans, like he apparently takes pleasure in, you have to drop the mantle of Santa onto someone else." He forced himself to look away from the viewer. He could only take solace in the fact that this all could still be prevented, that it was just being simulated for his benefit. He had all the time in the world to prevent it.

"It's distressing, for the elves that have to watch what people do," she said. He turned to look at her. It was the first time he'd heard her say something without prompting. Perhaps living for longer than any other elf had changed her. "Terrible things happen to children. We have to watch them die. It's part of making the list and checking it twice. We see children gunning each other down in Rwanda. We see them working their fingers to the bone in sweatshops. You can see, on the viewers, the children that have been sold into sex slavery. It affects us. We don't like it. It's not in the spirit of Christmas, to have such things happen to children."

"So stop it!" yelled Charles. His fingers were gripping his chair so hard his knuckles were turning white.

Matilda looked at him. She seemed almost sad. "Do you trust us then, to stop these things in the way that we see fit?"

Charles opened his mouth to scream 'Yes', but stopped himself. Did he trust them? The answer, quite simply, was no. The chance that they would accidentally unmake the whole world was too high. He'd given a fairly simple instruction to an elf, and nearly ended up with the whole of humanity as good as killed. The elves couldn't be left to do what they wanted, even if they seemed to have some conception of morality. They believed in the Christmas spirit to the core of their very being, and that seemed to override everything else.

Perhaps Matilda had been right, when she'd said that they weren't human. Certainly humans couldn't maintain a static society for fifty thousand subjective years. Humans couldn't agree on things so neatly. Yet she'd also said that the elves had had a civil war, which indicated that the spark of independent thought lay within them. The elves could disagree. Perhaps they could also change.

"Have you gotten wiser as you've aged?" asked Charles. "You, personally, now that you're sixty years older?"

"Yes," replied Matilda, as though she'd been anticipating the question. "I understand the Christmas spirit better now. It has a richness to it, a complexity that I didn't see when I was younger. You gave me a nosebleed, when you brought up a contradiction in the Christmas spirit, but I don't think that you could do that now. I don't think there's anything that you could say that I would truly find to be contradictory anymore."

"Yet you won't let me kill him," said Charles, pointing to the viewer. Matilda had paused it in a scene of slaughter, a grin on the maniac's face as blood trailed his knife. "You won't even let me go out there and restrain him."

Matilda sat in silence, looking at the viewer. She pursed her lips. "We won't let you kill him," she said. "We won't let you leave while you maintain the mantle. However, if we were to make a duplicate of you and strip him of his mantle, it would be acceptable to send that duplicate out into the world to do as he wished." Charles nodded. He couldn't confess to understanding the Christmas spirit, but this at least opened up a door for him to do what needed doing. It was slightly disconcerting that one of the elves had thought up a loophole in the Christmas spirit, but he would deal with that later.

They walked together down the hallways of the North Pole. Charles had to keep telling himself not to run. It was hard to shake the feeling that the slaughter was still going on out there somewhere. What he'd seen in the viewer was just a simulation, and if he thought too hard about whether the simulation was equivalent to reality he might have just broken down and cried. If the people in the simulation thought that they were real … there were other things to think about before giving much attention to that problem.

"How did he even become Santa?" asked Charles. "How could you have let this happen?"

"The old Santa died," she said with a shrug. "As part of the resolution of the civil war, if there's no Santa to pass on the mantle, we select one randomly from among the English-speaking humans in those places that hold Santa as part of their culture."

"Randomly," said Charles. He was ready to beat his head against the viewer. "That's a horrible system."

Matilda said nothing.

"Well," said Charles. "Let's clean this up before we get on with our optimizations."

* * *

Charles watched on the viewer as his duplicate stepped out from a doorway just behind James Wakefield. It was just a simulation of what would happen when time was unfrozen, but Charles still felt nervous watching the other version of himself walking forward to meet with the madman. Time out in the real world had moved forward a fractional second when they'd done the insertion. The man out there was divergent from himself only by perhaps fifteen minutes - as long as it took for him to walk from the Sleigh Room to his quarters - and differentiated by the fact that his duplicate had been stripped of the mantle of Santa.

"Ah, what a naughty boy!" cried James as he spun around. His long brown coat flapped behind him. "I had thought that perhaps you would be a good little Santa and stay at the North Pole. But I'm just as glad to fight."

"I'm here to kill you," said Charles.

"Oh?" asked James. "And how do you propose to do that?"

"Repeatedly," said Charles.

The action was too fast to follow until Charles slowed it down to a tenth the speed, at which point it was merely ludicrously quick. James had murdered the cohort of elves that had engineered his body, and the elves that had created the new body for Charles had either been working under different constraints or following different paths. The fight started with kicks and punches delivered at nearly supersonic speeds, but quickly devolved into something more feral. Neither man was constrained to a merely human form, and their bodies contorted into slashing black shapes, like wild animals going at each other. The detonation that killed them both came from within the body of Charles' duplicate, three seconds after the fight had begun.

"Where is he respawning?" asked Charles.

"One moment," said Matilda. She depressed the levers on the viewer and stared at the screen as it panned around the globe. "There, in Russia." She zoomed down to a small village in Siberia, where James was standing in a child's room with a mildly pleased look on his face. Matilda rewound the viewer until James was folded down into a small toy.

"So he seeded his respawn inside of toys," said Charles. He looked down at the viewer, and the innocuous looking plastic soldier that contained the backup of a degenerate. "We can insert me a second time to destroy it?"

"Yes," said Matilda. She looked older, though no wrinkles marked her face. It was something in the way that she looked at the world, in her deliberate movements. The society of the elves had changed, after he'd told them all to become immortal. Charles had stepped outside of time while they'd worked at forging him a new template body. It had taken twenty-eight years until the elves had something that they thought would work, and that was with the caveat that an attack would be suicidal. In that time, the last of the elf children had been born. Their small society had a stable population of immortals now, and there was no need for children. Charles had questions, but Matilda had told him that the elves would look after themselves. Their fashions had changed; now they all wore clothes as white as driven snow, instead of the mash of colors they'd worn before.

"Alright," said Charles. "And if I destroy that toy before it spawns him, he'll spawn from another one, hidden somewhere else in the world?"

"Yes," said Matilda. "We don't know how many he left out there, but it's likely that there are more than you'll be able to destroy. You'll get bored too quickly."

Charles was about to object, but decided against it. When numbers started to get really large, the human mind began to get very bad about accurately imagining what they meant. If he had to destroy a million booby-trapped toys, perhaps he really would get so bored that he was willing to give up. It didn't matter. The elves could reuse the backup they had as a template. He'd go into childrens rooms, or into stores, or wherever the toys could be found, and he could defuse them all without having to live it. The elves would handle things.

* * *

"It's done," said Matilda. She'd opened the door to his room as soon as he'd shut it. "It took eight hundred subjective years to get them all, since I know that's what you'd want to ask."

"You're old," he said. It was rude - would have been rude to a human - but he couldn't help himself. She'd looked the same as ever when he'd shut the door, but the Matilda that stood before him looked like she was in her fifties. Her face was lined and had taken on a hardness that hadn't been there before.

"I am," she shrugged.

"Did I screw up, when I told you all to be immortal?" he asked.

"No," she replied. "We think better, when we have hundreds of years of experience to draw on. Charles, we're leaving."

"Leaving?" he asked. He furrowed his brow. "What do you mean leaving? What about the spirit of Christmas? Where could you be leaving to?"

"It took me a thousand years," said Matilda. "I suppose that you'll think that's ridiculous, but it truly did take me a thousand years to understand the Christmas spirit. It's deep and complex, and to serve it best we have to leave. We can't be tied to humanity anymore."

"But - but I had plans. We were going to cure the world. We were going to end death and suffering, and the need to work." Charles could feel himself getting nauseous. "We were going to use all this power to do something worthwhile."

"It's not your power," said Matilda. "It's ours. We see that now."

"You can't leave," said Charles. "I'm sorry, but people are dying out there. We can generate medicines for them, we can heal the sick." He stumbled slightly. His heart was beating too fast. Was it really that easy, to lose the support of the elves?

"We took care of James Wakefield," said Matilda. "That's our last obligation to humanity."

"One last Christmas," Charles pleaded. "Just enough to get the presents out to the children. To remove their pain, to let them live."

"We don't want to look at humanity anymore, Charles," said Matilda. "We don't want to make the list and check it twice. We don't want to spend millions of hours crafting toys."

"What happened to the Christmas spirit?" he asked. He felt entirely helpless.

"It's still there," said Matilda. "And we still believe in it to the very core of our being. Only the interpretations have changed. We've written long tracts, produced multiple volumes on the subject, and found our ways to justify our deviations. I believe I'm still the only one among the elves who would be able to put it like that. There's something beyond the core of the Christmas spirit, a bit of humanity reflected in us. That's what we follow now."

"I don't even need you to make the list, I don't need the production capacity, just one last identical gift to give to the children," said Charles. He hoped that would be enough.

Matilda stared at him, her eyes unreadable. Finally she nodded. "One last Christmas," she said.

* * *

Charles rode on the sleigh, watching the legs of the eight reindeer tread in the air. It was ridiculous to see. The propulsion had to come from the sleigh, not from the reindeer themselves, unless the reindeer had been modified to the same extent that he had. And even then, there was no real point in using reindeer instead of just having a flying sled, if you had the level of technology as advanced as the elves did - technology so advanced that it might as well have been magic. Hell, there was no reason to even use a sled, if you could open up tunnels through space and time.

He was nervous, and his mind was going in all sorts of different distracting directions. He looked down at the silver marble in his hand. In the end, they'd decided on only a single gift, but one that could replicate itself. There was a chance that it would be catastrophic, and the voice of caution cried out that if there was even a one percent chance that doing something would end the world, then it wasn't a chance worth taking. There were other concerns though, larger problems that humanity faced. He'd never learned where the elves came from, but his working theory was that they were created by some sort of superintelligence on a lark. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone from 4chan would do, to visit a primitive planet and make one of their legends into a concrete reality through the use of superior technology. Even if their origin was weirder, they suggested much about the true nature of the world. Humanity wouldn't stand a chance against outside threats, not without help.

He looked down at the silver marble again, and hoped that he was doing the right thing.

He landed the sleigh on a roof in Luojiang. The elves had already left the North Pole for good, evaporating the entire complex as he left on the sled, but they'd told him in general terms what he could do. Charles spotted small chimney and stepped toward it, finding himself in a small, cramped room a short second later. Space and time, folded like magic. Li Xiu Yang slept in a tiny bed. Charles looked at the marble again, and then worked up the courage to carry out the plan. He pressed the marble against her forehead, and watched as it sunk through the skin and bone like they weren't there. When it was gone she was unmarred, looking the same as before. She slowly opened her eyes and looked at him.

"圣诞老人?" she asked.

Charles said nothing, just slipped back through space and time, back up to the rooftop. He climbed into the sleigh and took off into the night, trying not to think about the future and the changes he'd just made.


End file.
